I was conscious that Harriet had obeyed my order and was lying prone across the seat. But only from the edge of my vision, for my attention was centered on the man fifteen feet in front of the car and off to one side. He didn’t look at all dangerous. He had a round, bland face with an amiable expression on it. In the headlights of our car, his rimless glasses glinted like oversized eyes.
He moved faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. His hand was a blur as it came from his pocket. He fired without aiming, squeezing the trigger as the gun came up. My gun went off a fraction of a second later.
Either he was a marvelous shot or lucky. His slug caught me high in the left arm, jarring me backward so that I sat heavily on the seat. My shot must have been ten feet over his head.
He fired again, putting a neat hole in the windshield. The bullet would also have put a neat hole in my head if I hadn’t slid sidewise in the seat in order to shoot around the windshield at him.
I missed with my second shot, and then he was running back toward his car. I got off a third just as he dived in front of it. I heard my slug whang into his right front fender.
I was out of the car then and moving away from it in order to draw his fire away from Harriet. A bullet whizzed past me as I found the protection of a tree on the opposite side of the sidewalk.
“Give it up, mister,” I called. “Throw out your gun.”
A bullet plunked into the other side of the tree in answer. Each of us had now spent three rounds. Quickly I reloaded and threw three rapid shots at the Buick, hoping he would think that left my gun empty.
Apparently he did. Leaving the protection of the Buick, he broke across the street for the areaway between two apartment houses. I took off after him just as two spaced shots sounded from the convertible. Harriet had sat up and was firing with the same methodicalness she would have used on the practice range.
As I sprinted past the Buick, I saw the man stagger from one of Harriet’s shots. Then he disappeared into the blackness between the two buildings.
I made the back yard at a dead run. It was backed by an eight-foot board fence, and I could see the silhouette of the suspect straddling the top of it. I took careful aim and fired.
In the darkness he didn’t make much of a target, but I must have hit him, for he let out a yell. He made it the rest of the way over the fence, though, and dropped to the alley on the other side.
Ramming my pistol into its holster, I ran at the fence, jumped upward and grasped the top with both hands.
In the excitement I had forgotten my arm wound. There was no grip at all in my left hand. It slipped free, and my weight tore loose the grip of my other hand. My feet hit the ground with a jar.
From the other side of the fence I could hear feet pounding away down the alley, the sound fading in volume as the fleeing man put distance between us. I fumbled along the fence until I found a gate in it, but it was padlocked.
There wasn’t anything to do but return to the street.
The shots had brought people all along the street to their windows and doors. Harriet had put her gun away and was telling a group of people who had spilled from one of the apartment houses that it was police business, and to go back inside. They just stood there, gaping at her, open-mouthed.
I said to her, “He made it over a fence. We’ll have to use one of these people’s phones.”
She looked at me. Her eyes widened at the splotch of blood on my arm, and she said, “You’re hit, Joe!”
“Scratch,” I said. I wasn’t being heroic. While the wound was beginning to pain, I could tell by the use I still had of my arm that it was only a flesh wound. “We have to get this on the air.”
I asked the group of civilians generally, “One of you got a phone we can use?”
They all started to talk at once. An old man in a dressing gown talked the loudest, though. He got across that he lived on the first floor right inside the apartment entrance, and that he had a phone.
Thirty seconds later I had Communications on the wire. A minute after that sirens began to sound, as every available unit in the area responded to a Code 3. When a policeman reports being shot at, it’s always a Code 3 call. No other report gets as prompt and complete response. Not just because policemen stick together. Few criminals, even hardened ones, will fire at an armed officer. When one does, we know he’s the most dangerous kind of criminal, and is a menace to every person he meets until he is caught. So we go all out to get him.
The three stakeout cars got there first, arriving almost simultaneously. We didn’t have to brief them on what had happened, because I had given the whole story to Communications and it had been relayed over the air. Every unit in the area knew the details of the gunfight, and scores of police officers were now blocking off the whole district and making a systematic search for the suspect.
I hadn’t mentioned my wound to Communications, though. When the aged tenant of the apartment from which I had phoned let Frank and Jack Emlet in, they were surprised to find me shirtless and Harriet putting a temporary dressing on my arm with some bandage material she had borrowed from the old man.
“You nicked bad, Joe?” Frank asked, with concern.
“Flesh wound,” I said. “Won’t lay me up any.”
“Better get over to Central Receiving,” Jack advised.
I started to draw my bloodied shirt and jacket back on. “Plan to,” I said. “Nothing more we can do here, anyway. The situation’s under control. Probably got a hundred or more officers screening the area.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “What happened, anyway, that you tried to take the suspect halfway between stakeout points?”
“Blowout. We meant to lead him up Eighth past Wynn and Brasher, but we ran over a broken bottle. He decided it was a good opportunity to hit — a lone woman with a flat tire on a deserted street. There wasn’t anything to do but play it out.”
Frank shook his head gloomily. “Tough break. One of those things you can’t figure.”
“We should net him, anyway,” I said. “He can’t get far with two slugs in him.”
We went outside then, after thanking the old man for the use of his apartment. While Frank was calling for Latent Prints to come out and go over the Buick the suspect had abandoned, Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher jacked up the convertible and replaced the blown-out tire with the spare. Then Harriet drove me over to Central Receiving, where I had the temporary dressing she had put on replaced by a permanent one.
It was past 1:30 a.m. when we got back to the Police Building. We checked in long enough to find out whether or not the suspect had been picked up.
He hadn’t. Somehow or other he had managed to squeeze through the police net with two bullets in him and get clear away.
Chapter IX
Although I felt perfectly all right and capable of pulling at least restricted duty, the captain insisted I take a week’s sick leave because of my wound. I spent it lying around my apartment catching up on my reading.
Frank phoned every day to find out how I was and brief me on what was going on at Homicide. Especially on the progress of the convertible-bandit case, as I had a particular interest in that. Most police work is impersonal, but when a suspect puts a bullet in you, you tend to develop a personal interest in his apprehension.
There hadn’t been any progress. Latent Prints had developed a number of prints from the Buick the suspect had abandoned, but it turned out to be another stolen car, and all the prints checked out as having been made by the owner or members of his family. A pair of ordinary white work gloves were found on the seat of the car. Apparently they had been worn by the suspect when he’d stolen it, and he hadn’t taken them off until he got out of the Buick to approach the convertible. They were of a type purchasable in any dime store, and were untraceable.